Supervisors Act to Reduce Overtime

Stung by reports of rampant overtime spending by county officials, the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday adopted new get-tough policies aimed at significantly reducing such spending.

The series of actions taken by the supervisors included directing their top fiscal officers to look into the feasibility of creating separate overtime accounts for each of the county’s 38 departments so the supervisors can closely monitor such payments. The board also ordered all county officials to adhere to existing requirements that they seek approval for all overtime expenditures.

The actions, all done on a unanimous voice vote at the urging of board Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky, were prompted by an embarrassing report by the Bureau of State Audits on Monday.

That report, circulated among top county officials and obtained by The Times, concluded that the county has already paid out more than $106 million in overtime during the first six months of this fiscal year, or 24% more than for the same period last year. The state auditors also reported that 14 of the 38 departments--including some of the largest users of overtime pay, such as the health department and sheriff--have not sought the required approval for such expenditures from the chief administrative officer every three months.

At the supervisors’ weekly board meeting Tuesday, Yaroslavsky said such abuses of overtime pay cannot be allowed to continue, especially with the county still in the throes of a fiscal crisis.

“We need to get our hands, overall, around overtime” problems, said Yaroslavsky. “These kinds of moneys that are being spent, especially when they weren’t budgeted, they weren’t projected, they weren’t predicted, by the department heads--there’s no telling how it’s being spent in some cases.”

In preparation for the meeting, Yaroslavsky had directed top county officials to respond to the state audit. Auditor-Controller Alan Sasaki said the two departments that have far outspent all others in overtime this year are the Probation and Health Services department.

Leaders of those departments said they have been forced to spend so much on overtime because of serious budget cutbacks that have gutted staffing levels in recent years.

Health Services Director Mark Finucane said in an interview that paying for so much overtime--148% more than was spent during the same period last year--makes sense because it allows the department to keep staffing levels as low as possible, while giving it the ability to deal with sudden influxes in patients during emergencies.

Acting Probation Director Walt Kelly said his department spends so much on overtime due to severe overcrowding at the juvenile probation camps, which require one officer for every 10 juveniles.

Kelly said, however, that the overtime issue has concerned him enough to launch a comprehensive review of staffing issues, to see if the money could be better spent on hiring more employees.

“Some people believe that paying overtime is cheaper than hiring” more staffers, Kelly said. ‘I’m not convinced of that and I’m having staff looking into it.”

When staffers work too much overtime, they may become fatigued and, therefore, less efficient, Kelly said. “I think that has to be a concern. And that is something that we’ll have to look at.”

Some departments didn’t appear to be spending more than they were budgeted for the year, according to Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen.

Nevertheless, he said, the skirting of approval requirements needed to be stopped immediately.

Such abuses of the county requirement--which has been on the books since 1993--give department heads the impression they can spend as much as they want on overtime, according to Yaroslavsky, a frequent critic of the board’s lax oversight of its department heads.

Citing the county’s two top fiscal administrators--Janssen and Sasaki--Yaroslavsky said: “I think every department head needs to know that when they authorize overtime, that it’s not only going to be subject to our authorization, but that it’s also going to be watched by you, by you and by us. We need to create as much disincentive as possible for approval of excessive overtime.”

Currently, the county spends more than $4.5 billion a year on salaries, overtime and employee benefits, but the departments aren’t required to itemize how much is spent on overtime. That makes it impossible for any kind of oversight from the board or the chief administrative officer, county officials said Tuesday.

When state auditors faulted the county for such lax controls over overtime in a review last year, the supervisors moved to place stricter controls on the departments, requiring them to submit requests for overtime on a quarterly basis.

But few of the county’s larger departments are doing so, according to the state auditors. On Tuesday, the board once again directed the departments to begin submitting the requests.

The supervisors directed Janssen, Sasaki and other county officials to come up with other ways of better tracking overtime costs by the end of the month, when deliberations over the next fiscal year’s budget officially begin.

Janssen said some of the county departments cited by state auditors spend so little money on overtime that prior approval may be more trouble than it’s worth. As for the others, he said, “It won’t take long to reestablish controls . . . to see to it that they start complying.”

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti pledged Tuesday to begin submitting the requests.

Finucane said it is nearly impossible for his mammoth department to get approval for all overtime, but that his aides would make every effort possible to do so.

But Sheriff Sherman Block--who has also defied the supervisors--said in a statement that he doesn’t need approval of the chief administrative officer as long as he stays within the annual budget allotted to him by the county.

“Whatever overtime is expended by the Sheriff’s Department is within the total funds budgeted for salary and employee benefits,” Block said. “It is not an overexpenditure.”